Archive for the ‘NSA’ Category

Mike Lee: NSA Spying Is ‘What Gov’t Does When Left Unrestrained’ – Fox News Insider

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) reacted to comments from Rep. Devin Nunes that the cases of 'unmaskings' during the Obama administration included information about civilians.

Nunes said there was a "treasure trove" of information about people other than Gen. Michael Flynn and Russian envoys.

"This is what governments do when left unrestrained," Lee said.

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He said he was troubled by the fact the Obama administration had enough power to cull information about everyday Americans.

"The government can use overwhelming force and power to engage in political espionage," he said.

Lee said legislators must follow the lead of Founding Father James Otis of Massachusetts, who warned against such activity.

"Otis was a big believer in that government will intrude into a man's house unless restricted," Lee said, calling for better oversight of spying activity.

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Mike Lee: NSA Spying Is 'What Gov't Does When Left Unrestrained' - Fox News Insider

Elijah Cummings demands DNI, NSA leaders turn over documents … – Washington Examiner

The top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee wants the nation's top intelligence officials to turn over documents that describe their conversations with President Trump on Russia's meddling in the 2016 election.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the committee's ranking member, sent separate letters to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers requesting documents, recordings, memos, notes and communications related to their conversations with the president or other White House staff about the investigations into Russia's role in the election.

The Maryland Democrat's requests follow a Washington Post report from earlier this month that said Trump asked Rogers and Coats to deny any existence of collusion between Trump's campaign associates and Russia.

The president asked the two top intelligence officials to help him push back against the FBI's investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election, according to the Washington Post.

Both Coats and Rogers refused Trump's requests.

"The report ... stated that the president urged both of you 'to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion durign the 2016 election,' but that you refused these requests, which you 'both deemed to be inappropriate,'" Cummings wrote.

Previous reports suggest Rogers and his staff may have memorialized his conversations with the president.

A senior official at the National Security Agency reportedly detailed Rogers' conversation with Trump about the Russia investigation in an internal memo.

Additionally, Coats said during congressional testimony earlier this month he would provide information about his conversation with Trump to a congressional "investigatory committee."

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Elijah Cummings demands DNI, NSA leaders turn over documents ... - Washington Examiner

NSA in Unprecedented Hunt for KremlinGate Evidence – Observer

In my last column, I broke the news that Admiral Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, reportedly explained to his workforce last week that he had declined to assist President Donald Trump in his efforts to undermine the FBI and its counterintelligence investigation of the White House. As Rogers is said to have explained to agency personnel, There is no question that we have evidence of election involvement and questionable contacts with the Russians.

On this basis, Admiral Rogers confirmed the existence of highly classified signals intelligence which establishes some sort of collusion between Team Trump and the Kremlin during the 2016 election campaign. However, now that the Justice Department has appointed Robert Mueller special counsel charged with running the Russia investigation, NSA is apparently pulling out all the stops to track down any additional evidence which might be relevant to the expanded inquiry into KremlinGate.

Specifically, last week NSA is believed to have sent out an unprecedented order to the Directorate of Operations, the agencys largest unit. The DO, as insiders term it, manages all of NSAs SIGINT assets worldwide, making it the most important spy operation on earth. The email sent to every person assigned to the DO came from the Office of General Counsel, the NSAs in-house lawyers, and it was something seldom seen at the agencya preservation order.

Such an order would have charged every DO official, from junior analysts to senior managers, with finding any references to individuals involved in KremlinGate, especially high-ranking Americansand preserving those records for Federal investigators. This would include intercepted phone calls and any transcripts of them, emails, online chats, faxesanything the agency might have picked up last year.

At the request of NSA officials, I will not name the specific individuals that DO personnel have been told to be on the lookout for in SIGINT intercepts, but one could fairly surmise that the list includes virtually all key members of Team Trump.

There are several possible ways such individuals can come up in raw SIGINT. First, they might be the people talking or chatting: in other words, first-person intercept. If NSA has a relevant top-secret warrant issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, such intelligence collection is perfectly legalas well as highly classified.

Second, someone might recount a conversation with one of the individuals the DO is interested in. This seems to be the scenario behind the recent sensational story about how Jared Kushnerthe presidents son-in-law, all-purpose adviser, and former publisher of Observeris said to have asked Sergei Kislyak, Russias ambassador in Washington, to use his embassys secure communications to talk to Moscow. NSA reportedly intercepted a conversation between Kislyak and the Kremlin in which the ambassador relayed Kushners request to his bosses back home.

Third is a kind of intercept which NSA terms reflections, meaning that none of the individuals on the DOs list are involved, but one or more of them are being discussed by third parties. For instance, this could be a conversation between foreign officials about Team Trump and its mounting Russia problems. If the people discussing it are VIPs, their opinions may have intelligence value for policymakers in Washingtoneven if their conversation may shed no new investigative light on KremlinGate.

An example: if NSA intercepts a conversation in which senior diplomats from Middle Eastern countries are chatting about Trumps relationship with Moscow, that could be an important reflection of how their countries leaderships view the situation in Washington. If one of those Middle Eastern countries is a close ally (or avowed enemy) of the United States, their views of KremlinGate would be of interest to high-ranking American officials, even if the conversation is based on no more than press reports and office gossip.

The DO is divided into offices which focus on a specific country or region (e.g. China, the Middle East) or on a defined problem set (e.g. counterterrorism, counterintelligence). Months ago, the DOs Russia shop is said to have received a preservation order from the agencys lawyersno surprise, given what that office does. Now such an order has reportedly been passed to the whole DO, including offices which have nothing to do with Russia. This demonstrates the agencys serious intent to provide investigators with any evidence which may shed additional light on KremlinGate.

That said, NSA may have another motive in issuing this DO-wide order. Such motive is the Intelligence Communitys venerable tradition of self-preservation, what spy-veterans term CYA. As Trumps Russia problems have heated up, his fans and media allies have made increasingly serious accusations of malfeasance by NSA and other spy agencies under President Obama. Some of these wild charges have been ludicrous, merely lies created by Kremlin disinformation outlets, then parroted by right-wing media in America.

That media has lavished particular attention on the issue of SIGINT unmasking, meaning the process of how NSA responds to high-level requests to reveal the name of any American who appears in an intelligence report (normally those names are redacted; for an explanation of how this complex issue really works, see this). Although theres no evidence of any systematic abuse of unmasking by President Obama, this hasnt halted the increasingly shrill accusations.

The Kremlin has tried to smear NSA for years, and that clandestine campaign got a big boost with the defection of Edward Snowden to Moscow almost four years ago. As Ive explained, discrediting NSA and its global intelligence partnerships played a key role in Russias interference in our election last year. In order to counter pervasive lies about the agency and its mission, the reported preservation order includes collecting all customer requests for unmaskings, plus records of which agency analysts accessed the information and when, exactly: in other words, complete data trails of all incidents of SIGINT unmasking in 2016.

An undertaking of this size and scope has never happened in NSAs 65-year history. Although preservation orders have been issued previously, never has the entire DO been told to search all its databases for SIGINT on named individuals, then preserve anything thats discovered. KremlinGate is a unique event in our nations history, with accusations of nefarious meddling by hostile intelligence agencies in our democracy, and its bringing about unprecedented developments in our spy agencies too.

Given the complex nature of SIGINTsuch a DO preservation order will require thousands of analysts to reexamine at least hundreds of thousands of intercepted communicationsit seems likely that some relevant information will be uncovered. Although the public may not learn of new evidence anytime soon, we can rest assured that anything pertinent to the KremlinGate inquiry will be shared with the FBI and Bob Muellers investigators without delay.

John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, hes also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. Hes published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.

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NSA in Unprecedented Hunt for KremlinGate Evidence - Observer

Why the NSA Makes Us More Vulnerable to Cyberattacks The Lessons of WannaCry – Foreign Affairs

There is plenty of blame to go around for the WannaCry ransomware that spread throughout the Internet earlier this month, disrupting work at hospitals, factories, businesses, and universities. First, there are the writers of the malicious software, which blocks victims access to their computers until they pay a fee. Then there are the users who didnt install the Windows security patch that would have prevented an attack. A small portion of the blame falls on Microsoft, which wrote the insecure code in the first place. One could certainly condemn the Shadow Brokers, a group of hackers with links to Russia who stole and published the National Security Agency attack tools that included the exploit code used in the ransomware. But before all of this, there was the NSA, which found the vulnerability years ago and decided to exploit it rather than disclose it.

All software contains bugs or errors in the code. Some of these bugs have security implications, granting an attacker unauthorized access to or control of a computer. These vulnerabilities are rampant in the software we all use. A piece of software as large and complex as Microsoft Windows will contain hundreds of them, maybe more. These vulnerabilities have obvious criminal uses that can be neutralized if patched. Modern software is patched all the timeeither on a fixed schedule, such as once a month with Microsoft, or whenever required, as with the Chrome browser.

When the U.S. government discovers a vulnerability in a piece of software, however, it decides between two competing equities. It can keep it secret and use it offensively, to gather foreign intelligence, help execute search warrants, or deliver malware. Or it can alert the software vendor and see that the vulnerability is patched, protecting the countryand, for that matter, the worldfrom similar attacks by foreign governments and cybercriminals. Its an either-or choice. As former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith has said, Every offensive weapon is a (potential)

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Why the NSA Makes Us More Vulnerable to Cyberattacks The Lessons of WannaCry - Foreign Affairs

NSA leakers begin sign-ups for monthly leak subscription service – The Hill

A group of suspected National Security Agency (NSA) leakers known as the ShadowBrokers on Tuesday announced more details of their monthly subscription service to provide remaining documents from their NSA cache.

The group has been releasing files that appear to have been pilfered from the NSA in 2013 since last summer most notably releasing a suite of Windows hacking tools that were subsequently used in the Wanna Cry ransomware that induced a global panic earlier this month.

The ShadowBrokers on Tuesday posted instructions on how to join a "Wine of the Month" club for new NSA leaks. In the post, the group said interested parties should send 100 ZCash coins a digital currency akin to bitcoin to sign up for the service. Enrollment will begin June 1 and end June 30.

ZCash coins are currently worth over $230 apiece, making the sign-up cost more $23,000. Only available since October, ZCash is a relatively new entry into the digital currency market, something the ShadowBrokers address in a Q-and-A section of itspost:

"Q: Is Zcash safe and reliable?

"[Explitive] no! If you caring about loosing $20k+ Euro then not being for you. Monthly dump is being for high rollers, hackers, security companies, OEMs, and governments. Playing 'the game' is involving risks."

The post is written in the ShadowBrokers' trademark inconsistent broken English, widely believed to be an attempt to conceal the group's identity.

Little is known about the ShadowBrokers, including whether they are a group or individual, and hackers or NSA insiders leaking files. They first appeared in August trying to auction the complete set of tools, releasing an initial leak purportedly to drum up interest in the sale.

They returned in April to leak Windows tools in what the Brokers said was a protest of President Trump abandoning his hard-right positions for a more centrist view.

In an apparent attempt to capitalize on the notorietyof Wanna Cry, the ShadowBrokers announced their monthly leaking service just after Wanna Cry warranted international headlines.

The leaked documents appear to be at least in part genuine NSA documents. One of the hacking tools releasedby the group contained an identification code mentioned in a previously unreleased Edward Snowden file.

The ShadowBrokers claim they will not announce the contents of the monthlyleaks in advance.

"Q: What is going to be in the next dump?" ask the Brokers in the Monday post.

"TheShadowBrokers is not deciding yet. Something of value to someone. See theshadowbrokers previous posts... Peoples is seeing what happenings when theshadowbrokers is showing theshadowbrokers first. This is being wrong question. Question to be asking 'Can my organization afford not to be first to get access to theshadowbrokers dumps?'"

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NSA leakers begin sign-ups for monthly leak subscription service - The Hill